Category: History of Computing and Multimedia

Ong: Secondary Orality and Secondary Visualism

Wandering some more through the Notes from the Walter Ong Collection blog I came across an intriguing note on Revising Secondary Orality and Secondary Visualism. The Walter J. Ong Collection at Saint Louis University has PDFs of lectures including one on Secondary Orality and Secondary Visualism (PDF). In the lecture Ong seems to be thinking about virtual reality as a form of secondary visuality just as radio and television are a secondary orality. If secondary orality is orality which is scripted (while appearing spontaneous like the oral), secondary visuality would be planned while being visually spontaneous. Perhaps the scripting or planning in this case would be the code that makes virtual spaces available rather than the scripting of the humans in the space.

Image of VRML Dream

Secondary visuality might be like the VRML Dream – a performance of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream that was streamed over the Internet with VRML. According to a student who participated when he was younger, they had two sets of performers – the voice actors in one room and the VRML body actors in another. Or secondary visuality could be visualizations that transcode data from one sensory modality to another (from text to the visual.)

Zielinski: Deep Time of the Media

Image of Cover Siegried Zielinski’s Deep Time of the Media (translated by Gloria Custance, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, c2006) is an unusual book that pokes into the lost histories of media technologies in order to start “toward an archaeology of hearing and seeing by technical means” (as the subtitle goes.) Zielinski starts by talking about the usual linear history of media technologies that recovers what predicts what we believe is important. This is the Vannevar Bush, Ted Nelson type of history. Zielinski looks away from the well known precursurs towards the magical and tries to recover those moments of diversity of technologies. (He writes about Gould’s idea of punctuated equilibrium as a model for media technologies – ie. that we have bursts of diversity and then periods of conformity.)

I’m interested in his idea of the magical, because I think it is important to the culture of computing. The magical for Zielinski is not a primitive precursor of science or efficiency. The magical is an attitude towards possibility that finds spectacle in technology. Zielinksi has a series of conclusions that sort of sketch out how to preserve the magical:

Developed media worlds need artistic, scientific, technical, and magical challenges.  (p. 255)

Cultivating dramaturgies of difference is an effective remedy against the increasing ergonomization of the technical media wolrds that is taking place under the banner of ostensible linear progress. (p. 259)

Establishing effective connections with the peripheries, without attempting to integrate these into the centers, can help to maintain the worlds of the media in a state that is open and transformable. (p. 261)

The most important precondition for guaranteeing the continued existence of relatively power-free spaces in media worlds is to refrain from all claims to occupying the center. (p. 269)

The problem with imagining media worlds that intervene, of analyzing and developing them creatively, is not so much finding an appropriate framework but rather allowing them to develop with and within time. (p. 270)

Kairos poetry in media worlds is potentially an efficacious tool against expropriation of the moment. (p. 272)

Artistic praxis in media worlds is a matter of extravagant expenditure. Ist priviledged location are not palaces but open laboratories. (p. 276)

LEGO Brick: 50 years

googlelego.gif

You know something is up when Google’s graphic of the day is made of LEGO blocks – it is the 50th anniversary of the LEGO block. Gizmodo has a nice LEGO Brick Timeline: 50 Years of Building Frenzy and Curiosities. They explain that Google founders Page and Brin used LEGO blocks to build an expandable disk storage casing for their prototype search engine in 1996.

Fluxus Portal

Diagram of Fluxus

I was down in Chicago for the MLA convention and visited the Art Institute of Chicago. Besides the spectacular collection, they had a small display of materials related to Fluxus – a conceptual art group of the 1960s that is still going (depending on who you believe.) Fluxus was influenced by John Cage and included artists like Joseph Beuys, Yoko Ono, and Nam June Pack. Fluxus believed in “intermedia” – the confrontation of media. The Wikipedia entry summarizes their philosophy:

  1. Fluxus is an attitude. It is not a movement or a style.
  2. Fluxus is intermedia. Fluxus creators like to see what happens when different media intersect. They use found & everyday objects, sounds, images, and texts to create new combinations of objects, sounds, images, and texts.
  3. Fluxus works are simple. The art is small, the texts are short, and the performances are brief.
  4. Fluxus is fun. Humour has always been an important element in Fluxus.

I picked up a strange book by a Fluxus poet, Emmet Williams, A Flexible History of Fluxus Facts & Fictions that contains digitally remastered kunstfibels or art inventions. It is a inventive history of Fluxus that is itself annotated art, but also, as Williams explains, a primer (another sense of “fibel”.) For a contemporary sense of Fluxus see the  Fluxus Portal from which the diagram above comes. Diagramming their history and influences is one feature of the exhibit that attracted me. Fluxus founder Macunias was diagramming the flow of their history back in 1966. See Visualising Art History.

CarveWright: Digital Woodworking

Image of CarveWrightDigital woodcarvers, CNC for the home shop is here! CarveWright is a computer controlled router that can handle wood up to 15 inches wide, 5 inches high and many feet long. It comes with software that uses a “clipart” paradigm so you can combine ornate patterns and then “print” them to wood (or plastic or other soft materials.)

Sears Craftsman has issued the carver as CompuCarve and you can see their ad on YouTube.

I’m tempted to say that this could be a revolutionary product for home woodworkers. Woodworking has always had an element of danger (spinning saws) and an element of manual skill. With tools like the CarveWright it could become a form of output where the skill is in the use of the software not the struggle with the medium. Wood will become plastic – something to be molded as if it had no grain to cut along. For that matter, the CarveWright can be thought of as the first affodable 3-D printer (though it is being marketed to woodworkers first.) Just as CNC has had a dramatic effect on design and manufacturing, now affordable devices bring engineering into the home. What could you do with an all-material 3-D printer? Would you be buying plans for a stove instead of the stove itself?

I have fantasized about replacing all the dangerous tools in my shop with one CNC router big enough to do any shaping from undressed wood. Now that a scaled down version exists, I’m scared the craft of woodworking will fade away like typesetting. Why have a dangerous table-saw when the CarveWright will rip wood, and will do so safely (though slowly)? Am I afraid that anyone will be able to do projects I struggled over? Will it be like the 80s with desktop publishing and all the ugly newsletters and typesetters helplessly complaining? (Looking at the examples on the CarveWright site certainly suggests that bad taste dominates initially.) Or will it turn out just to be another shop tool that gathers the dust of good intentions?

The Mind Tool: Edward Vanhoutte’s Blog

Edware Vanhoutte, who has done some of the best work on the history of humanities computing (though much is not yet published), has started a blog. In his first entry, The Mind Tool: Edward Vanhoutte’s Blog, he summarizes early text books that were used to teach humanities computing. It would be interesting to look at how these 70s and 80s books conceive of the computer and how they differ from the 50s and 60s work like that of Booth.

History of Technology Videos

One of the educational virtues of YouTube is that one can now find historic footage about computers like the 1984 Macintosh Commercial by Ridley Scott above or the Apple Shareholder Meeting where Steve Jobs introduced the Macintosh. Many of the videos posted are amateur (and bizarre) efforts, but many are interesting as historic documents themselves, like Computer History – A British View from 1969.

I haven’t found any really good lists of links to online video, but here are some starting points:

Has anyone found a good list of what is out there?

Desk Set (1957)

Image of movie coverDesk Set (1957) is a Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy movie about automation where Tracy, an engineer is brought in to automate the research department run by Bunny Watson (Hepburn.) There is a moment of interest to digital humanists when Tracy is showing off EMERAC:

Boss: Well there she is, EMERAC, the modern miracle …

Richard Sumner (Tracy): The purpose of this machine, of course, is to free the worker…

Bunny Watson (Hepburn): You can say that again…

Sumner: …to free the worker from the routine and repetitive tasks and liberate his time for more important work.

For example, you see all those books there … and the ones up there? Well, every fact in them has been fed into Emmy. What do you have there?

Operator: This is Hamlet

Boss: That’s Hamlet?

Operator: Yes the entire text.

Sumner: In code, of course… Now these little cards create electronic impulses which are accepted and retained by the machine so that in the future, if anyone calls up and wants a quotation from Hamlet the research worker types it into the machine here, Emmi goes to work, and the answer comes out here.

Boss: And it never makes a mistake.

Sumner: Well … Now that’s not entirely accurate. Emmy can make a mistake.

Bunny: Ha ha…

Sumner: But only if the human element makes the mistake first.

Boss: Tell me Bunny, has EMERAC been helping you any?

Bunny: Well frankly it hasn’t started to give yet. For the past two weeks we’ve been feeding it information. But I think you could safely say that it will provide more leisure for more people.

There is an image of EMERAC on Flickr.